Daniel Adler

Research Overview

I am a Ph.D. graduate from the HHMI/NIBIB Interfaces Program at the University of Pennsylvania. I conducted research under the supervision of Prof. Paul Yushkevich. Prior to working at PICSL, I completed the Perelman School of Medicine’s 1.5-year pre-clinical curriculum. A major goal of my work was to improve our understanding of hippocampal anatomy using MRI and histological imaging, towards the goal of developing improved subfield-specific biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment effect monitoring in dementia.

Postmortem atlas of the human hippocampal formation

  • We constructed a probabilistic atlas of the human hippocampal formation from fused histology and high-resolution, ex vivo MRI acquired at 9.4T from 25 specimens
  • Data for this atlas was reconstructed and co-registered with the help of HistoloZee, software that we developed for 3D reconstruction and registration of very large histology datasets. HistoloZee allows interactive co-registration of histology slides to each other and with MRI volumes. HistoloZee It also permits multi-scale viewing and management of large slide collections and it includes GPU-accelerated processing features to guide registration in real-time.

GPU-accelerated medical image registration

My M.Sc. thesis research was on leveraging the programmable GPU graphics pipeline for 3D affine and deformable medical image registration (joint work with Sonny Chan under the supervision of J. Ross Mitchell). Click here for a video of Dr. Mitchell running a demo of our software (recorded in 2007) and motivating the use of accelerated registration in the clinical setting.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, 2016
  • M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, University of Calgary, 2010
  • B.Sc. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of Calgary, 2006

Recent journal and conference publications